I always wanted to be an interpreter of my time. One's work is always autobiographical reflecting your life at the time you did it. I always felt I was like a filtration system processing materials floating around me, attempting to select, emphasize and editorialize. Life is the raw material. I try to make something out of it. - Ed Paschke, 1990

December 1, 2004

New York Times obituary by Roberta Smith

Ed Paschke, a well-known Chicago painter whose neon colors, zombielike figures, acid-toned Kool-Aid formalism and love of urban subcultures brought a distinctively dark vision to Pop Art, died on Thursday at his home in Chicago. He was 65.

The cause was heart failure, said his son, Marc.

Along with Jim Nutt, Peter Saul and to some extent Ed Ruscha, Mr. Paschke was an artist whose contribution to the art of his time was somewhat obscured by his distance from New York. As with Paul Klee's assimilation of Cubism, his version of Pop Art proved that an art movement's ideas need not weaken as they spread outward.Like Mr. Nutt, Mr. Paschke was associated with the Chicago Imagists, a group of artists whose intensely mannered figurative styles borrowed from popular culture, outsider art and Surrealism. But Mr. Paschke was alone among them in basing his images on photographs culled from television, newspaper and magazines.

One of the first artists to paint using an opaque projector, he was crucially influenced by the photo-based paintings of Andy Warhol, whom he considered the most important of all postwar artists. This admiration had an indelible effect on his best-known student, Jeff Koons.

In a telephone interview yesterday, Mr. Koons, who studied with Mr. Paschke at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and worked as his studio assistant, said:"Ed Paschke taught me what it meant to be a professional artist. His paintings are like drugs, but in a good way: they are among the strongest physical images that I've ever seen. They affect you neurologically."

A lanky man with a courtly, self-deprecating manner, Mr. Paschke was considered an outstanding teacher. He had taught at Northwestern University in the department of art theory and practice since 1976.

Edward Francis Paschke Jr. was born in Chicago in 1939, and seems to have been an instinctive urbanite; as a child, he itched to get back to the city whenever his father's varied career took the family to the suburbs or briefly to a farm in Wisconsin. His early art influences included the caricatures his father drew on letters home from Europe while serving in the occupation forces immediately after World War II.

After excelling at art and athletics in high school, where he contributed cartoons to the school paper, he earned a bachelor of fine arts degree from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1961. His first serious employment as an artist was illustrating fiction and nonfiction for Playboy magazine, which he did intermittently until 1989.

Mr. Paschke's encounters with the margins of American life were varied and formative. In the early 1960's he spent time in New York filming people he found "bizarre and interesting" in bars in Harlem or on the Lower East Side, usually in exchange for a drink. In Chicago he visited bars and nightclubs in different neighborhoods in a car full of jackets, changing clothes according to the clientele. Attempting to avoid the draft, he worked as an aide in a psychiatric center, which he said "left a great mark on my soul." While serving in the Army in Louisana from 1962 to 1964, he was part of a detail that tracked AWOL soldiers throughout the backcountry of the South.

His early paintings focused on movie stars, wrestlers and circus freaks of all kinds, their appearances exaggerated by illustrational precision, strange textures and inharmonious colors. He painted Marilyn Monroe as a green-faced accordion player and Claudette Colbert as a tattooed lady. As he developed, identifiable personalities gave way to blank faces and silhouettes. These were not so much images as afterimages that seemed to have burned through one scrimlike layer of color to reveal another. His surfaces were further defined by horizontal bands, staticky patterns and flitting lines of color that reflected an attention to electronic media. His brooding fluorescent tones, often painted over black grounds, kept pace with the palette of color video exploited by artists from Bruce Nauman to Matthew Barney. I

In the last 15 years of his life Mr. Paschke reworked his layers and voids of color into portraits of George Washington, Adolf Hitler, Elvis Presley, Abraham Lincoln and Osama bin Laden. Mr. Paschke's work is in the collections of major museums in the United States and abroad. He had his first solo show at the Deson-Zaks Gallery in Chicago in 1970 and his first New York show at Hundred Acres in SoHo in 1971. From 1977 to 1996 he exhibited regularly with the Phyllis Kind Gallery, in both Chicago and New York. The first retrospective of his work was at the Pompidou Center in 1989. His most recent exhibitions were in September and October at the Maya Polsky Gallery in Chicago and the Galerie Darthea Speyer in Paris.

In addition to his son Marc, of San Francisco, Mr. Paschke is survived by his mother, Waldrine of Grand Rapids, Mich.; his wife, Nancy, and his daughter, Sharon, of Chicago; and one granddaughter.